Welcome First Time Users!

first time users

Welcome to the Iowa Public Health Tracking Portal, a centralized source for public health data in Iowa. The goal of this portal is to provide information to help improve where we live, work, and play.

To sign up for updates related to the Portal click here to subscribe.

The Iowa Public Health Tracking Portal includes data from a variety of sources, and generally falls into the following categories:

Health effect data: Data about health conditions and diseases, such as asthma and birth defects.
Environmental hazard data: Data about chemicals or other substances such as carbon monoxide and air pollution in the environment.
Exposure data: Data about the amount of a chemical in a person's body, such as lead in blood.
Other data: Data that helps us learn about relationships between social, biological, and environmental factors and health effects. For example, information about age, sex, race, and behavior or lifestyle choices that may help us understand the prevalence of health issues in a population.

In an effort to make the portal data usable and understandable, the portal includes background information and descriptive details for each of the topic areas. Much of the data on the portal are presented as Nationally Consistent Data Measures (NCDMs). Using NCDMs to report data make it possible to compare rates between counties, and other states in the CDC Environmental Public Health Tracking Network.

The data and measures are presented in several different ways on the portal:

Bite: A single quick piece of information.
Snack: An easy-to-read graph or chart that may be slightly customizable.
Meal: An interactive page that present data from a single topic area as tables, charts, and maps. Users can filter and select certain options, and modify the tables and charts.
Report: Interactive report accessed as an Excel download that presents cross cutting views of data.

Timeliness

The portal includes the most recent complete year of data available from the agency or program that originally collected the data. Some data sets take longer to collect and verify which means that the most recent year available may be from 2-3 years ago. Data are generally updated once a year.

Confidentiality

The privacy of individuals' health data is protected by law. When the number of cases of a health condition is small and/or the total number of people from which the case(s) come is small, those particular data cannot be made public since it could be possible to trace the data back to individuals. Since the risk for a breach of confidentiality is higher when reporting small numbers, these values are suppressed on the portal and presented using an asterisk (*). Counts of five or fewer are suppressed on the portal. Additional information can be found in the IDPH Disclosure of Confidential Public Health Information, Records, or Data Policy. pdf